I’ve always put significantly more stock in the winners of the IGF than I have in the more mainstream gaming awards. In particular, I’ve found that the winner of the Seumas McNally Grand Prize is usually worth a play, especially if you’re into game design more generally.
This year’s winner was Titanium Court, a quirky little match-3 hybrid roguelike with more than a few interesting ideas brewing under the proverbial hood. Given how it won both the grand prize and an award for overall game design, I decided to take a look at the public demo over the weekend and see what all the fuss is about.
After doing so, whatever expectations I had about what Titanium Court is or isn’t quickly evaporated into thin air.
What is Titanium Court, then?
Calling this a simple match-3 roguelike would be accurate but also a criminal over-simplification. There’s also a tower defense element that ripples through the experience. Here, you must try to link together different terrain types into groups of three or more, removing them from the board and eventually advancing the story.
Your match-3 puzzling feeds into a neat tower defense loop where you must generate resources to raise troops to fight your enemies. These battles are then auto-resolved, with your little pixels sent to deal with whatever is on the board when you’ve run out of moves.
If that were all there was to it, Titanium Court would be another perfectly engaging roguelike match-3 puzzler; however, this award-winning game from developer AP Thomson is much cleverer than I’m making it sound.
The blend of gameplay is highly engaging, but I think the reason I found Titanium Court so utterly compelling is the narrative layer that joins everything together.
Not only does the story advance the gameplay in a bunch of really interesting ways, but it’s also thoroughly absurd. There’s not much that joins them from a gameplay perspective, but I was constantly reminded of the spirit of The Stanley Parable, a true favourite of mine.
When is the Titanium Court release date?
After playing the demo, I was immediately interested in finding out when Titanium Court would be finished and back in my grubby hands.
Those loveable scamps at Fellow Traveller are handling publishing duties, but so far the only thing that has escaped their collective lips is a very general release window of 2026.
That means I’ve got some waiting to do until Titanium Court is complete and ready to be played. Yet, after trying out the public demo on Steam, which is playable on both Windows PC and Mac, I’m completely sold on this oddball video game, and I recommend you join me in getting excited for its full release.
